Christ and the Existential Imagination

In every generation Christologists have sought to keep the Christ of the Gospels from being displaced by philosophically generated substitutes. One such alien Christ has arisen out of existentialist fiction, in a form that the four Evangelists would not have recognized. Since the vastly influential symbolism of the existential imagination is “anti-Christ,” Christian apologetics must offer a persuasive refutation. Let us seek to counter that existential symbolism by using three of its favorite terms: freedom, being, and reason.

Freedom And The Existentialist Christ

The disturbing thing about one prominent existentialist view of the freedom of man is its insistence that freedom can be realized only in the “death of God.” The “death of God” as a theological event in the teachings of the Christian atheists has been short-lived and only vaguely influential. But in philosophy since Nietzsche, the death of God has been considered a valid philosophical position and, oddly enough, one whose acceptance grants man freedom. Thomas Altizer may not have spoken for very many theologians but he did speak for a host of existentialists when he wrote: “Yet the ‘good news’ of the death of God can liberate us from our dread of an alien beyond” (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 145).

The creators of existentialist fiction have tended to see man as free only when he is free from the necessity of God. Consider the dialogue between Zeus and Orestes, who (as the redeemer of Argos) approximates a Christ figure himself, in Sartre’s The Flies:

ZEUS: Impudent spawn! So I am not your king. Who then made you?

ORESTES: YOU. But you blundered; you should not have made me free.

ZEUS: I gave you freedom that you might serve me.

ORESTES: Perhaps. But now it has turned against its giver [No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1948, p. 120].

Orestes can be free only when he is free of Zeus. When Orestes threatens to become an evangelist and publish his “good news” that Zeus (God) is no longer necessary, Zeus remarks:

Poor People! Your gift to them will be a sad one: of loneliness and shame. You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid upon them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon [p. 123].

Thus the freedom given to man in the death of God is not a beautiful and wondrous freedom. Rather it is an awesome and fearful freedom for which man must bear all the responsibility.

This same view of man’s freedom in the death of God is influencing many current novelists and dramatists. One reviewer, Andrew Sarris, wrote of the movie Rosemary’s Baby:

The Devil in Rosemary’s Baby is reduced to an unimaginative rapist performing a ridiculous ritual. It could not be otherwise in an age that proclaims that God is dead. Without God, the devil is pure camp, and his followers, fugitives from a Charles Addams Cartoon [Films, 68/69, p. 50].

Rosemary Woodhouse, the heroine, is seen in the book as a psychological captive; she is manipulated by her husband, neighbors, and physician. Her baby, once born, seems not so much the son of Satan as a negative infant Jesus (born in the year one of the new Satanic Age), whose life is threatened by his knife-bearing mother much as the Christ child’s was by Herod’s henchmen. Rosemary herself does not become finally free until she accepts the son of Satan as her own. If this logic does not symbolize the death of God, it certainly does symbolize his dismissal as sovereign.

The dominant error in the view of total freedom without God is the presupposition that in the biblical view freedom is light and easy. Christ taught consistently the awesome responsibility in the autonomy that God has extended to man. Matthew 25:31 ff., for example, illustrates the final fate of those who would not answer with seriousness the responsibility implicit in Christian freedom.

Further, Jesus taught that the path to ultimate human freedom lay through complete self-negation (Luke 9:23). Becoming free requires not the “death of God” but the “death of self.” It is an intriguing paradox in Christian thought that self-denial does not end the Christian’s responsibility but rather increases it. While the Christian does negate himself in entering into discipleship and while he continues to negate himself in his daily walk with Christ (Gal. 2:20), still as an individual he is accountable unto God (Rom. 2:16). Because Christian existence ultimately must face God for approval, it carries with it both temporal and eternal accountabilities far graver than those established in existentialism. Therefore Christologists may confidently bring the full force of Christ’s teaching on freedom against the second-rate freedom of the God-slayers.

Being And The Existentialist Christ

Being as posited by the Christ of existentialist fiction is ever a bleak affair. In Christ’s Address From the World Temple, Sartre has the Christ say:

I have been through the worlds, ascended to the suns and flown along the milky ways, through the wastes of heaven, but there is no God. I have descended as far as existence casts its shadow and looked into the abyss and cried, “Father, where art thou?” But I heard only the eternal tempest which none controls [quoted in Helmut Thielicke, The Silence of God, p. 5].

Then, in such a way that the drama tugs with pity, the dead infants come out from their graves and cry to the Lofty Christ, “Jesus, have we no father?” And the Christ is forced to answer, “We are all orphans, I and you, we have no Father.” Such views of being are indeed bleak.

This same ontology is offered by the 1964 film Parable, in which the Christ figure is a circus clown who goes about with wordless gestures of kindness trying to help other performers. In the end he is beaten lifeless by the ruffians he was trying to help. The film might have been a more adequate conceptualization with the addition of resurrection symbolism. Without this, it can offer only a barren view of essence.

The current rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar presents the Christ symbol as a dream-filled messiah, crushed by an existence that is completely absurd and void. Again, no hint is offered that resurrection followed the sequence and replaced absurdity with ultimate being.

William Blake pointed to the cyclical absurdity of existence in his poem The Mental Traveller, in which the Christ figure suffers symbolically for all who suffer and live:

And if the Babe is born a Boy

He’s given to a Woman Old,

Who nails him down upon a rock,

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,

She pierces both his hands and feet,

She cuts his heart out at his side

To make it feel both cold and heat

[quoted in Literary Symbolism, ed. by Maurice Beebe, p. 143].

These lines are toward the beginning of the poem; the last two verses suggest that absurdity is cyclical and the ever-present circumstance of every man in every generation.

Being in the existentialist imagination is not subject to objectification or defined identity. As The Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “Existentialists, believing as they do that reality always evades adequate conceptualization, are especially apt to treat ‘being’ as a name, the ‘name,’ in fact, of a realm which we vainly aspire to comprehend” (p. 148). Being thus is a kind of animated blur to existentialists.

Again we can see that the Christ of the existentialists is weak where the Saviour of the Scriptures is strong. Christ offers a fullness of being that can be complete only in himself, being that is characterized by hope and not despair. Christ offered himself as Ultimate Being, which, when contingent with human being, provides for man the qualities of greatness inherent in Christ’s being. One such quality is eternal life (see John 10:28).

If we substitute the word being for the word life in any number of Scripture passages, we can successfully answer the existentialists that being without absurdity is real in Jesus Christ: “This [being] is in the Son” (1 John 5:11). “In him was [being] and that [being] was the light of men” (John 1:4). “For God so loved … that whosoever believeth in him should not perish [eternal absurdity] but have everlasting [being]” (John 3:16). Paul ecstatically affirmed the ultimacy of human being when he proclaimed, “For me to [be] is Christ …” (Phil. 1:21).

The being offered by Christ is made secure by two great concepts: the Being of God the Father and the Resurrection. The Being of God the Father is that original being, complete in and of itself, from which all other being stems. God made his own claim of Ultimate Being when he said, “I am that I am” (Exod. 3:14). This statement is a constant and lays down the certitude of God’s being from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus made the same claim for himself (John 8:58).

In his resurrection, however, being became a laboratory proposition. If Christ had ended with his cross, we would have to concede that the existentialists are right in saying life is absurd and necessarily ends that way. Remember Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians not to grieve over the dead in the same manner as their pagan peers. This is a firm injunction against any insinuation that Christian life ever ends in absurdity (1 Thess. 4:13). Paul further states in his letter to the Corinthians: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:17–19).

The resurrection makes it clear that no life in Christ is absurd, for all life ends in a new kind of being that absurdity cannot threaten. Therefore, let Christologists bring the real Christ against the orphaned model of the existentialists and teach the energized and meaningful ontology of our Saviour.

‘As An Army With Banners’

The hunt:

handlettered

vellum parcht

in Imperial flames,

the written word gave

a flickering,

smoking light/papyrus

scrolls leave

ashes of revelation to darken

the Emperor’s mind.

Burnt words spread

the Word.

Anointed

with Nero’s oil,

the saints

were candles of flesh

but their burning eyes

saw the Beast

cast down into

endless fire & dark.

“These atheists

are foes

of man, god

& state.

Both them & their fool

of a christ.”

Ignatius, Polycarp,

Felicitas, Perpetua,

Blandina, Stephanos,

Petros & Paulos:

blood seeds dropt

in the Roman furrow.

F. EUGENE WARREN

Reason And The Existentialist Christ

Briefly, at least, we must consider the Christ of the Gospels and the issue of reason. The whole field of philosophical existentialism came into being primarily as a reaction against rationalism.

Nietzsche felt that Christ would have found God himself unreasonable had he lived a little longer and reached a greater degree of maturity. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he wrote:

Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and the just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live and love the earth—and laugh also!! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained my age!

Later in the same work Nietzsche cites the birth of Christ as an absurdity in itself:

‘Twas once—methinks year one of our blessed Lord,

Drunk without wine, the Sybil thus deplored:

“How ill things go!

Decline! Decline! Ne’er sank the world so low!

Rome hath turned harlot and harlot stew,

Rome’s Caesar a beast, and God—hath turned a Jew!”

Zarathustra’s Christ was totally unacceptable on the basis of reason: it was altogether unreasonable that God could or would become a Jew (although because of the anti-Semitism here one wonders if Nietzsche would have found it quite so unreasonable if God had become a German).

It is a strange dichotomy that the existentialists have used reason to demonstrate that faith in Christ is unreasonable, indeed, that reason itself is unreasonable. John 1:1 speaks of the “beginnings” with their logos—Divine, Ultimate Reason. And Jesus claimed in Revelation 22:13 that he was the Alpha and Omega of the human story. Much of what is going on between the Beginning and the End is characterized by an absurdity completely void of reason. But on either end of history stands the logos of God, the Divine Reason, against which the reasoning of the existential fictionalists appears insignificantly shallow.

So we see that freedom, being, and reason in their archetypes belong to the Christ of the Gospels. He is well able to offer meaning and hope to this generation, as he did to those that preceded it. In real freedom, heightened being, and hope, there is always redemption from nothingness and absurdity.

Calvin Miller is pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He received the B.S. degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and the M.Div. from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written four books.

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